This is from a previous blog I had when I lived in China. The website has long since shut down, but I saved all of my old posts in case I wanted to resurrect them for a new blog. This one is edited from January 05, 2016.
New Year's Eve 2015
I had the day off work, but one of my coworkers was in a talent show down the road from where I live. I met some of my coworkers at KFC, then we went to the show. Afterwards, my friend Merlin and I went to the cat café before we met everyone for KTV. The cat café was one of my favorite places to visit in Yichang, since I didn't have any pets myself, so I went there quite a bit.
NYE cat café visit!
KTV with Friends
The KTV place was really interesting because a bunch of us went, and we had a huge room. If you don't know what KTV is, it is karaoke, but not quite the same as in the US. In Yichang, KTV (Karaoke) is in a private room, and the one we got was the size of a living room. It was so big that it even had a coat closet and a bathroom. (For those of you who are so interested in my toilet experiences in China, it was a western toilet, but you couldn't flush the toilet paper. It literally would not go down, and there was even a set of tongs to take it out and throw it in the garbage. I don't even want to know what would have happened with a #2. haha) We had the room from 8pm-2am. The first few hours, people actually got up to sing, and the Chinese people with us were so good, that we thought the microphones were turned off, and we were just listening to the original songs because they were in Chinese, and we never heard them before. Nope, the girls with us were just that good!
Merlin and me Me, Polynn, and Laura Group photo!
This was the first year that I didn't count down to midnight. We meant to, but we lost track of time until 12:03. We pretended we didn't miss it and counted down for the fun of it anyway. There were no fireworks, but we saw a bunch of people setting off lanterns, which was pretty cool, too.
These were the photos I took of the lanterns. My 2015 phone clearly wasn't so great with night photos.
The After Party
We walked back to the KTV place and mostly just played the music without anyone singing, just to dance. I had enough baijo that I didn't care what I looked like dancing for once. When our time was over, a few of us decided to go to Helen's (the bar), and I ended up getting home a little after 5am (Wow, my 30 year old self can't even imagine doing that anymore).
New Year's Day
I woke up around noon, but I was still tired and took way too long to get out of bed. There is a grocery store below my building, so I bought groceries, still in my pajamas (though I was wearing my coat, so you couldn't really tell, not that I cared that much at this point) and went back upstairs to cook. As I was heating up the oil, it caught fire. Holy crap--scariest day of my life! I also found out that there are no smoke alarms in my room. I knew that you shouldn't throw water on an oil fire, but I had nothing to put it out with. I called my boss freaking out (the fire was huge!), and she was a cool as a cucumber while I panicked enough for both of us. Eventually, the fire just went out on its own.
Here, you can see the damage from the fire. The grease cup on the exhaust hood definitely melted. It's hard to tell by the crappy phone picture, but my apartment was filled with smoke.
Kirsten asked me if I wanted to go with her to walk her dog Michael, and I told her what had just happened. It was perfect timing! I opened all of my windows and left to meet her. We got something to eat, too, because, well, I wasn't going to be cooking again.
Here we are at Happy Bird!
I bought a new pan, and I waited about a week before attempting to cook again. What a way to start 2016! I keep telling myself that since I'm in China, I can have a second chance at a good start with the Chinese New Year. Plus, it's going to be the year of the monkey, which is my Chinese zodiac. It's gotta be a good year! :D
(Spoiler alert: I got food poisoning and shit my pants on my birthday, so it wasn't as great as I was thinking when I originally wrote this, but it did end up being amazing year overall!)
Thanks for reading! We'll see what 2023 brings!
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